This list deliberately leaves “tiny version of Redis, Kafka or SQLite” territory behind. That was the first list of 20 primitives. The more interesting search space is a primitive that introduces a new operation, one developers might eventually feel should have existed all along. Some research paper or niche project has probably explored pieces of these. They’re meant as category-level concepts, not smaller copies of familiar products.

Forty primitives

1. Reach. Store a current state plus transition rules and continuously maintain which states are reachable from here: REACHABLE(current_state). A database answers what is; Reach answers what can happen. Uses: AI agent safety, workflows, infrastructure, manufacturing, cybersecurity attack paths.

Run the 20 primitive project ideas through the four-question screen strictly and the ranking changes a lot. Several technically attractive ideas turn into weak projects. The economic buyer is unclear, free infrastructure already solves the problem well enough, or the moat amounts to “ours is smaller.”

So Statefile, Lease, BareQueue, TTL, Count, Remember, Freeze and probably ConfigLog go out at this stage. They all solve real engineering problems, but the money question is poor. Redis, SQLite, existing Go libraries, message queues, object storage, Git and cloud infrastructure already give acceptable answers. A tiny implementation might make a respectable GitHub project. “Simpler and smaller” doesn’t tell you who eventually writes a meaningful check.